Critic Reviews

When EF asked me to check out the home version of Time Pilot, I didn't expect much. Since the planes and stuff are small to begin with, I thought the home version would make them all look like specks or boxes. Well, I've got to hand it to Coleco. Time Pilot looks pretty good, but more important, it plays like a bandit.

Time Pilot is, for all intents and purposes, an old school shooter but with an 8 axis rotation, something that, for it's time back in 1982, was very different; but here we are in the year 2006 and while I'm not actually facing UFO's filling the skies I am facing their arcade incarnations. Time Pilot is a game of quick reflexes and, at times, pure unadulterated luck. You rack up points by shooting down anything that moves and for saving fellow Time Pilots parachuting amongst the battle in which you find yourself thrust in. The controls are slick and easy to use, making the game a hell of a lot of fun to play without forcing gamers to fumble around much. Now I don't know why men in the future happen to have parachutes, but again I'm not a historian.

Nice graphics with plenty of nuance and solid sound effects complement the exciting gameplay. The controls take some getting used to, but the swarming enemies in conjunction with the rotating, rapid-fire ship provide a time travel trip worth taking. Designer Yoshiki Okamoto loosely patterned Time Pilot after Bosconian, one of his favorite games.

Still, Time Pilot has gotten some nice upgrades on the 360. Though fully playable in its original form, the enhanced graphic mode and new sounds and music are excellent. The cloud transparencies are especially good, seeing as the originals were solid objects that could hide things you'd really want to see, and the dissipating smoke from a homing missile is another nice touch. Not faring so well is multi-player, which comes in both competitive and cooperative forms. Competitive isn't bad, with two people playing simultaneously for a high score in a split-screen setup, but cooperative just feels pointless. It's the same format as competitive, but both players combine their score with no other interaction between the two games. And as long as I'm grousing, would an auto-fire option have been too difficult to implement?

All in all, Time Pilot is a very likable game that has received some good updates. If you're a fan of classic arcade shooters, the 400-point (that's five bucks at current points pricing) entry fee is definitely worth it.

Overall, if you remember this game from 1982 and enjoyed it, it’s well worth your time. The graphics and sound overhaul are truly well done and since you probably haven’t played this game since the early 80s (unlike, say Pac-Man which has been available on every platform known to man), a $5 fee isn’t that big of a deal for this title. It is a try before you buy, but it’s better than I expected.

For being a cheap purchase, you aren’t losing out on much when you buy this game. Even so, $5 for a game is still kind of hard on the pocketbook when you could spend it on games such as Lumines Live! or maybe even some new themes for your Xbox 360. Time Pilot was enough to give me a few days of enjoyment out of the download. If you have never played Time Pilot in the past, I say buy it. If you played Time Pilot in the past, you already know if this is a wise purchase or not. And, if you’re looking to accumulate more achievement points, Time Pilot is an easy way to do so.

A pretty good job porting the game, but if you don't get into this game for the sake of make a run at the top of the leaderboard, or if you're not a shooter aficionado, you're probably not going to be to enthralled by this game. However, if you have Microsoft points lying around, this is sadly one of your better buys on the system at this point.

Time Pilot was a decent game back in the day, but when it’s compared to stuff like Pac- Man and Galaga, it doesn’t have much in the way of legs. Those games for some reason or another had endless appeal, they had a unique quality to them, they had re-play value and the makings of a true classic. That’s why they’re still so popular today. Time Pilot had and has none of that. Flashy new graphics and sound just aren’t enough to bring this game up to their level.

Time Pilot is an OK game that's probably worth $5 if a) you're bored; b) you love old school stuff no matter the subject; c) or you simply can't help yourself when it comes to gobbling up easy Achievements. Otherwise, skip it. It's a super "meh" game. There are plenty of excellent shooters on XBLA worth your while that don't require a rocky trip down memory lane.

It sounds great, but the visuals leave a lot to be desired. First of the all, the scrolling is awfully choppy, and the screen tends to get messy around the edges. It's also hard to line up your shots with oncoming aircraft, and having to constantly tap the button to shoot is a hassle. Sometimes your gun seems to lock up for no reason - usually at the worst possible moment. Time Pilot was a terrific arcade game, but this translation is only average.

Still, the graphics aren't half bad (especially the helicopters in the 1970 stage), and the game is challenging enough. Fans of the arcade game will be understandably disappointed, but those who take the game for what it might enjoy it.

Sadly, Time Pilot goes down as one of a long list of games to avoid on Live Arcade. It's the sort of bland shooter that if you tried it on MAME you'd barely give it a second look - so why does anyone think that gamers will part with 400 points for it? Sometimes the past is better off left alone, and someone badly needs to look up the word 'classic' in the dictionary.